Retail Media Startup Symbiosys Wants to Help Brands Buy Targeted Ads Using Retailers’ Data

Symbiosys, the one-year-old startup backed by retail media veterans, wants a piece of retailers’ growing ad businesses.

After raising $9 million in a Series A round of funding in January, the firm is announcing its first partnerships, with DoorDash and Best Buy. The two retailers will test Symbiosys’ technology, which lets advertisers buy and target ads using retailers’ data. Symbiosys’ technology is plugged into platforms like Google, Meta and TikTok.

Symbiosys is one of a growing number of startups looking to cash in on retail media. The firm competes with companies like Criteo, Epsilon and Microsoft. Morgan Stanley forecasts that adtech firms will pocket $26 billion of the $130 billion advertisers spend on retail media this year.

The lofty promises of commerce media—better ad targeting as cookies decline, the ability to track sales and fat margins for retailers—make retail media one of the fastest-growing types of advertising. But much of that remains elusive, as retailers rush to stand up their media networks and advertisers face measurement challenges and high prices.

Firms like Symbiosys aim to solve those challenges, specifically around helping brands get more insight from retailers’ first-party data.

Symbiosys CEO Bashar Kachachi said his firm is trying to differentiate itself by focusing on mid-funnel advertising—like persuading someone to try a new brand.

“If you think of onsite [advertising], retail media as the very bottom of the funnel, and then branding—ads on the open web—as the top of the funnel, it felt like there was a really big, important opportunity in the middle of the funnel and not a lot of emphasis there,” Kachachi said. “Most consumers are beginning their shopping journeys on search engines or on social media platforms.”

Symbiosys’ leadership has a heavy background in retail media. Kachachi previously built adtech products at Microsoft and Google. Co-founder and advisor Jonathan Opdyke is the former CEO of HookLogic. Patrick Miller, cofounder of Flywheel Digital, which sold to Omnicom for $835 million, is also an advisor to Symbiosys. Two other HookLogic veterans, John Roswech and Dan Cooke, serve as chief revenue officer and senior vice president of engineering for Symbiosis, respectively.

What problem does Symbiosys solve?

As commerce media grows, Symbiosys is betting on the growth of offsite advertising. Retailers are bullish on offsite ads as a way to sell more without cramming units onto ecommerce websites.

“Excluding Amazon, most of the retail media revenue is still onsite. That’s the lion’s share,” Kachachi said. Onsite will continue to be a “crucial component,” he explained, but “offsite has the potential to be multiple times bigger.”

Symbiosys sells a white-labeled, self-service platform that plugs into a retailer’s first-party data and product inventory.

It lets advertisers run search, social and video campaigns by pulling the products that advertisers want to promote directly from a retailer’s product inventory. The ads direct people to the product page on the retailer’s ecommerce website. Retailers can then promote the ads using their own marketing dollars—a process Symbiosys calls collaborative bidding.

How does it make money?

Retailers pay a fee for the use of the platform.

Symbiosys has invested in expanding its customer base, product capabilities and media channels and adding to its staff since raising its Series A funding, Kachachi said. The company has 30 to 35 employees, which is “very engineering-heavy,” he said. He expects that headcount could grow by another 50% by the end of the year, depending on customer requirements and demand.

The offering is “very light on customizations” at this point, noted one buyer familiar with the company, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They have a nice idea that needs a little more time to mature.”

Still, the buyer did say that it could be a fit for one client, especially if Symbiosys can effectively de-duplicate sales attribution from search ads.

Who are its biggest competitors?

Kachachi said that Symbiosys fills a niche that other retail media startups don’t fill. However, a growing number of retail media firms including Criteo, Epsilon and Koddi are similarly betting big on offsite retail media. Google and Microsoft are also large players in retail media adtech.

Colleen Gomez, global head of performance marketing and analytics at HP, said the brand’s ad buys with Symbiosys are separate from other retail media and programmatic campaigns bought with The Trade Desk. For example, HP can target Best Buy’s shoppers on Google Ads and get data on sales attribution, scooping up low- to-mid-funnel customers with a high purchase intent.

On the retailer side, the self-service feature and ability to pool ad spending dollars was the biggest draw of Symbiosys, said Peter Giordano, general manager of ads platform and growth services at DoorDash.

“The co-bidding capabilities that they’ve brought to bear really makes this a win-win-win,” he added.